Pomp and Circumstance
Saturday, 19 May 2007.
Today, I graduated from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, one of the top schools in the nation. I was the top student in my class, with a perfect average and highest honors. I was awarded a prize from my department for my outstanding achievement.
I don’t say this to boast. I say this because I'm left aghast by how little it means to me. I spent four very long years at this school; I would, without hesitation, classify them as the most difficult, most painful, most beautiful, and most poignant years of my life to date. While I feel I've learned very little from my academic life, I think I've fully made recompense for that in what I have learned about life, love, poetry, and passion. I don’t claim wisdom, but I do like to think that, at least for my very few years upon the earth, that I'm a well-rounded and introspective individual.
Yet, walking across the stage and shaking the hands of important people in this world, honors and all, meant nothing but escape to me. I have my diploma: I've broken free of the cage whose clutches have held me for the better part of my existence, yet I see that it’s a cage that many fail to even see (or, even more interestingly, see and love). The best reasoning for this that I have seen is from the exquisite film The Shawshank Redemption, in which Ellis Redding says the following: “These walls are funny. First you hate them, then you get used to them. Enough time passes, you get so you depend on them. That’s institutionalized…. They send you here for life, and that’s exactly what they take. The part that counts, anyway.”
So am I saying that to live a life of academics is a life wasted? No, and I don’t think I'm prepared to make such a leap. But I will say that to live such a life, one sacrifices a lot of what makes them themselves, and a unique individual. It changes them into a different person. Some are prepared and willing to make the sacrifice, weighing the benefits and drawbacks. Others, however, make the sacrifice unwittingly: I know people who came to university for their undergraduate degree, only to go on to a masters out of love of the familiar, who then proceed to a doctorate, and remain as a post-doctorate researcher or professor because, by that time, they truly are suited for nothing else.
Perhaps an academic elite is a necessity in the world in which we live. But I'm not prepared to sacrifice my childlikeness and bizarre, unbound creativity to fit into those institutional walls. Not to say that academics are uncreative, but that their true creativity is stifled—trained out of them to a degree, if you will—by their many years of study and intellectual inbreeding. It stands them on the shoulders of giants, to be sure; but sometimes I feel as if it’s better to pick flowers at the giants' feet.
The academic training I received perhaps was necessary to learn the rules, since you may only break rules once you understand why they existed in the first place (e.g., see the lion of Zarathustra’s The Three Metamorphoses). But that’s all it was: sufficient training to prepare me enough to rebel against it. It was it’s own end. (Is such a thing a valid educational system? I havn’t formed a good enough opinion on that. It certainly functioned to some beautiful effect in the film V for Vendetta.)
So perhaps since my goal was to rebel in the first place, it is only natural that I didn’t grow too attached to my alma mater or to the world it embodies. I see this as only fitting, but what does it mean to those who live on a different path than my own?
Frost said this best, I suppose: “Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—I took the one less traveled by, and that has made all the difference.”
